Ad campaign on SkyTrain meant to encourage people to become vegetarian

An animal rights group has placed about 100 provocative ads on SkyTrain asking why people eat some animals such as pigs but not others such as dogs.

The ads started appearing earlier this week and show three sets of animals beside each other with the tag line: “Why love one but eat the other?” The paired animals are a puppy and a piglet, a kitten and a baby chick and a retriever and a cow.

The ad campaign by Mercy for Animals Canada poses a question to get people to think about why animals are divided into pets meant to be loved and food meant to be eaten, said Stéphane Perrais, the organization’s director of operations.

“We want to engage people,” he said by phone from Toronto.

“We want them to figure out how to answer that question. We’re asking them to look at the various practices and various ways we treat animals that we call family and the ones we call dinner.

“It’s really in our minds and our culture and the way we were brought up to think of these animals as significantly different so that we could turn a blind eye to the suffering of some animals and never allow such abuse on our own pets.

“The only difference between an cow and a dog and a pig and a cat is the way we treat them.”

The national ad campaign is meant to encourage people to switch to a vegetarian diet by going to the website chooseveg.ca.

Perrais was a vegetarian but became vegan two years ago. Vegan is someone who not only doesn’t eat meat but neither eats food made with animal products such as eggs or cheese nor wears animal products such as leather or furs.

He become vegan for ethical reasons when he looked into how animals are treated in factory farms. He believes others Canadians will make the same choice when they find out for themselves the origins of the food on their plate.

“What we realized in our discussion and research is that a large part of the public is kept in the dark about how their food is produced and all the practices and cruelty that goes on to make a hamburger and hotdog,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is left the veil over these practices so that people can realize themselves whether they are willing to engage and approve such practices in order to satisfy a desire to eat meat.”

Chooseveg.ca includes recipes and nutrition tips for people who choose a vegetarian diet along with testimonials from celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres, Bryan Adams and Pamela Anderson.

Chooseveg.ca has photographs and stories about rescued animals such as a chicken named Hope who was found on a pile of dead birds at an egg factory farm.

The website says that hens such as Hope are crammed into wire cages in factory farms where each one has less than the surface space of an iPad to live their lives.

“They are unable to spread their wings, walk, or forage for food,” Chooseveg.ca says.

“When they are just babies, they have their beaks seared off with a hot blade. This is an extremely painful procedure and many chickens die from starvation because it’s too excruciating to even eat.”

Perrais said there is no such thing as humane meat which he describes as an invention of the food industry.

“Whether it is labelled organic or free range, these animals are routinely subjected to mutilation,” he said.

“As soon as they’re unproductive, they’re killed in a very violent manner. It is very difficult to reconcile the terminology humane when animals have their lives taken away from them against their own will. That’s where we find that concept inadequate.”

Perrais admits that some people may answer the question posed in the ad campaign by saying they don’t make any distinction between species and would just as willingly eat a puppy as a pig.

“The consumption of any kind of animal product is always based on cruelty and abuse regardless of the type of animal,” he said.

Last July, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom to look at the neurobiological basis of conscious experience and related behaviours in human and non-human animals.

They concluded that “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

Pigs, for example, are known to be highly intelligent and social. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says that pigs communicate with one another with more than 20 different oinks, grunts and squeals.

“Newborn piglets learn to run to their mothers’ voices, and mother pigs sing to their young while nursing,” the PETA website says.

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Ad campaign on SkyTrain meant to encourage people to become vegetarian

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